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Between Literature and Data: Dafoe in the Digital Archive

Alumni

“Between Literature and Data: Dafoe in the Digital Archive” at 3 p.m. on October 3, in the Barney-Davi Board Room, is a discussion by Param Ajmera '14. He looks at:

How might digital archives be curated to make the intersections of colonialism and capitalism in culture more apparent? How might literary critics create and use data to explore questions of racialization and representation?

This presentation addresses these two questions by examining the celebrated eighteenth-century novelist Daniel Dafoe's presence in two digital archives — the HathiTrust Digital Library and the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). From highlighting the transnational networks of trade an enslavement in Dafoe's periodical “The Review,” to categorizing the illustrations in his most famous novel, “Robinson Carusoe, this talk explores the possibilities and challenges of using digital archives and theories of data modeling to work across large collections of texts in literary studies.